


Addictol

by Felixbug



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:20:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6114901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Felixbug/pseuds/Felixbug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“It stops the cravings,” Hancock says. “You’ll come out the other side of it and you’ll feel scrubbed raw and clear headed. Like every hangover you ever had just got erased out of your memory. Like you’ve got yourself a brand new body that doesn’t know what it is to wake up groping blind for anything that’ll make you functional enough to move. Clean. Really fucking </i>clean. <i>And about five minutes after that, you’ll realise you can’t stand it.”</i></p><p>Short, bittersweet angst about addiction and its complications. Hancock and Erik discuss addictol.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Addictol

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't really like most of my other writing. Just me playing around with my feelings about recovery, and acceptance, and addressing my immediate "yeah that wouldn't help at all" reaction to encountering addictol in-game. M rating is purely for the fairly heavy subject matter, there's no smut in this.

“Have you ever used it?”

Erik turns the inhaler between his fingers as he sits on the edge of the bed. It looks like jet – and christ, Hancock wishes it was. Jet is simple – it’s bitter chemical fire that smoulders and screams and _aches_ , it’s toxic and it’s beautiful and – he’s losing track. It’s not jet.

“You manage to find a chem I _haven’t_ tried, I’ll be impressed.” He summons a smirk and sits down beside him. “About five years ago.”

“Were you trying…” Erik trails off. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer.”

“To get clean? Shit, I don’t even know.” Hancock laughs. “If I was, it didn’t take.”

“I just want to get some control.” Erik closes his hand around the inhaler, and sighs. “I don’t really even want to _stop_ , just slow down.”

“It feels like a deathclaw’s rummaging through your guts,” Hancock says. “You’ll sweat enough to soak the mattress, puke your throat raw, spend a few hours wishing you were dead. Short and not even a little bit sweet. I’ve had worse but – well, only once.” Tritium, californium, and just enough jet to soothe the burn of the shimmering fog as he breathed it deep. A soaring high, radiation’s cleansing fire remaking him as someone new, someone better – then waking up in blood and agony and shedding flesh. Hancock shudders. Addictol’s one hell of a rough ride, but it doesn’t come close to that.

“Would it be worth it?”

Psycho withdrawal has been kicking Erik’s ass, and they both know it. They’re both pretending it started on the Prydwen – too much too fast, fuelling the attack that could have, _should_ have, got them both killed. But Hancock knows chemical escapism too damn well to have missed the signs before then. It’s easier to be angry than scared – god knows, it’s more satisfying to fight than run. Erik drinks because he can’t _not_ , and when he hits his low point the psycho is there to scald the melancholy out of him in a rush of blood and fury. He doesn’t break – he burns. And now the comedown drives him to his knees, leaves him choking on vomit and wracked with freezing shivers and begging for the spark to light his blood on fire again. It’s not easy, or pleasant, but that’s not the answer to his question. And Hancock loves him too much to lie.

“No,” he says. “No, I don’t think it is.”

They don’t talk about chems like this. They talk about the high and the side effects and the fun – and not so fun – interactions. They talk tolerances and dosages and cost. They don’t talk about the why, or where it’s all headed in the end – Hancock’s more or less immortal, and Erik lives like he thinks he is, and consequences aren’t something they acknowledge if they can avoid it. But Erik’s scared enough to have bought addictol, and now they’re talking about it, and Hancock’s not going to run off and leave him to face up to this alone.

“It stops the cravings,” Hancock says. “You’ll come out the other side of it and you’ll feel scrubbed raw and clear headed. Like every hangover you ever had just got erased out of your memory. Like you’ve got yourself a brand new body that doesn’t know what it is to wake up groping blind for anything that’ll make you functional enough to move. Clean. Really fucking _clean._ And about five minutes after that, you’ll realise you can’t stand it.”

He remembers it. It lasted a few days, and Hancock doesn’t even remember why he trudged on as far as he did – it seemed important once. Some self-righteous determination that _this_ was what he needed, that there was a standard of being a good man and this was part of it. A one-size-fits-all _fuck you_ to a world that had written him off as nothing at all. He remembers feeling tongue-tied and slow without the fizz of mentats in his mind, and wondering when he’d feel like himself again only to realise – this was _it_. He remembers the clean taste on his tongue as jet faded from memory, and the sudden greyness of a world where time no longer ebbed and flowed, rolling in slow waves and flickering, dancing out of reach. It droned at a steady pace, endless, monotonous, with every emotion limp and lifeless in the shallows. Sleep and hunger and sex became things his body asked for on its time, not his. The reins of chemical control had been yanked from his hands, leaving him with hands grasping at nothing, chasing something his body had forgotten how to beg for but his mind – _god_ his mind knew what it needed.

“I don’t know,” he says. Erik hasn’t released his grip on the inhaler yet, and he feels selfish, and stupid, for wishing that he would. Maybe it’s just him. Maybe Erik doesn’t need this the way he does. “Maybe it will be for you.”

***

“How do you feel?”

Erik’s up and about, bathed and dressed in clean clothes, and he looks tired but it’s a healthy kind of tired. The kind you fix with sleep, not stimulants. He joins Hancock sitting on the step outside their shack, and for a moment he doesn’t answer. There’s silence, other than the steady, comforting hum of the generator, and Erik’s skin is lit a deep, burned gold by the setting sun. He squints in the light, and slides his arm around Hancock’s waist.

“You were right,” he says. He sounds drained, and his fingers find the skinny ridge of Hancock’s hip and squeezes, like he’s looking for an anchor.

“The world’s gone to shit.” Hancock leans his head on Erik’s shoulder, and feels him relax – just a little. “Hell, maybe it was always shit. Anyone who can handle it sober’s gotta be more fucked up than either of us.”

“I feel like someone tidied up the shelves in my head,” Erik says. “Everything’s where it should be. And there’s bright lights pointing right at everything I was happy to bury under dust and rubble where it belonged.”

“Yeah. I know that feeling.”

“I don’t know what I expected.” He gives a short, bitter laugh, and shakes his head. “I left all my regrets two centuries ago, everyone who remembers my mistakes is dead, and I _still_ can’t face myself sober.”

Hancock knows that feeling too, but Erik knows him, and he doesn’t think he has to say it. He laces his fingers with Erik’s – rough irradiated leather against smooth skin.

“So, you keep hiding,” Hancock says. “So, you need a little help with that sometimes – the chemical kind. Maybe that’s not the worst kind of person to be.”

“Yeah.” Erik pulls him closer against him, and his fingers slip under the edge of Hancock’s shirt, tracing patterns on the scarred surface of his skin. “Maybe it’s not.”


End file.
